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Cursed contingency

WHAT is 'what is'?
According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, there are just two possibilities: It is, or it is not. We are talking about Reality with a capital 'R', what is really real, or ultimately real. What Is.
This world, these hands, this keyboard are all contingent phenomena, they could have been otherwise than the way they are. Reality, what is 'really real', cannot be contingent. If it is, then it necessarily is, and cannot not be.
In Reality, there can be no negativity, no 'not'. It is full, full to the brim of sheer Being. (Perfect, like a sphere, as Parmenides imagines it.)
The Greek atomists took Parmenides' 'It is' and chopped it up into random pieces, little particles of 'being' separated by sheer 'nothingness' (the 'logic of locomotion', Jonathan Barnes The First Philosophers). The principle of 'no more reason' (ou mallon) ensures that there will be atoms (atomos) of every conceivable shape and size.
All one needs to add to this dish is the principle of random motion. Order (cosmos) emerges from disorder (chaos) through a purely mechanical process.
(The atomists appealed to the principle of panning: when you swirl a mixture of sand and gravel in a shallow dish, the heavier particles move to the centre. Long before Darwin, the problem of mechanically creating order from disorder had been posed — and solved, in a way.)
Two and a half thousand years later, the young Wittgenstein, shells bursting around him in the trenches of the Austrian army in WWI, writes that meaning can only be possible if there are ultimate, necessarily existing semantic particles he calls 'simples' Logical atomism is the name given to Wittgenstein's theory.
And now comes the crunch: If Wittgenstein is right, if relational structures between simples or logical atoms is the only possible basis for meaning, then everything that can be meaningfully said must be contingent and cannot be necessary. The metaphysical, or the 'mystical' (Tractatus) cannot be 'said', because it cannot be analysed into, or expressed in the form of combinations of elementary propositions, which describe the combination and re-combination of simples.
At the same time, Wittgenstein's semantic analysis demonstrates the truth, inexpressible though it may be, that underlying all contingent phenomena is something necessary and indestructible: the logical framework within which terms and propositions combine and re-combine to express all possible states affairs, all possible 'worlds'.
These days, no-one subscribes to the young Wittgenstein's theory, a theory which he himself repudiated in Philosophical Investigations four decades later. But the ghost of contingency haunts us still. Yes, there is a way to distil the 'contingent' from the 'necessary' — but only if you are prepared to add the very thing in question: randomness.
Regardless of whether there is a necessary 'core' — in a physical sense, as the Greek atomists believed, or in the logical sense, as Wittgenstein argued in the Tractatus — you are stuck with the very same problem. Contingency. What is cannot be contingent.
Physicists today talk of 'super-symmetry' and the 'multiverse'. Generalizing Einstein's notion of symmetry to the maximum possible extent, is it conceivable that there could be one, and only one logically possible set of laws of nature? An equation with a seemingly limitless number of variables and yet only one unique solution?
Even then, it is hard to see how there could be only one logically possible world. Or, if all possible worlds are equally 'real', if Reality with a capital 'R', that which 'necessarily is' in Parmenides' sense, is the multiverse, how to account for the fact I am stuck here, now, in this randomly selected world rather than in some other randomly selected world?
No, it does not make sense. Don't rack your brains or weary yourself trying to make sense of it. You never will.
Physics is fine, physics is great, but at the end of the day our only choice is to embrace contingency. Facts are facts, brute facts, regardless of all the fancy explanations.
And yet all the time, you are still hankering for your 'Reality', your 'What is'. Give it up! You will never find it. There is no logical route from the necessary to the contingent. Or from the contingent to the necessary.
— Then let go of 'logic'. Close your eyes and pick a random direction. It will do just as well, probably better, as one you have reasoned out...